Moby Dick

Themes

An early enthusiast for the Melville Revival, British author E. M. Forster, remarked in 1927: "Moby-Dick is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem."[22] Yet he saw as "the essential" in the book "its prophetic song", which flows "like an undercurrent" beneath the surface action and morality.[23]

The hunt for the whale can be seen as a metaphor for an epistemological quest—in the words of biographer Laurie Robertson-Lorant, "man's search for meaning in a world of deceptive appearances and fatal delusions".[24] Ishmael's taxonomy of whales merely demonstrates "the limitations of scientific knowledge and the impossibility of achieving certainty". She also contrasts Ishmael's and Ahab's attitudes toward life, with Ishmael's open-minded and meditative, "polypositional stance" as antithetical to Ahab's monomania, adhering to dogmatic rigidity.[25]

Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco cites race as an example of this search for truth beneath surface differences, noting that all races are represented among the crew members of the Pequod. Although Ishmael initially is afraid of Queequeg as a tattooed possible cannibal, he soon decides "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."[26] While it may be rare for a mid-19th century American book to feature Black characters in a nonslavery context, slavery is frequently mentioned. The theme of race is carried primarily by Pip, the diminutive Black cabin boy.[27] When Pip has almost drowned, and Ahab, genuinely touched by Pip's suffering, questions him gently, Pip "can only parrot the language of an advertisement for the return of a fugitive slave: 'Pip! Reward for Pip!'".[28]

Editors Bryant and Springer suggest that perception is a central theme—the difficulty of seeing and understanding, which makes deep reality hard to discover and truth hard to pin down. Ahab explains that, like all things, the evil whale wears a disguise: "All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks"—and Ahab is determined to "strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside, except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall" (Ch. 36, "The Quarter-Deck"). This theme pervades the novel, perhaps never so emphatically as in "The Doubloon" (Ch. 99), where each crewmember perceives the coin in a way shaped by his own personality. Later, the American edition has Ahab "discover no sign" (Ch. 133) of the whale when he is staring into the deep. In fact, Moby Dick is then swimming up at him. In the British edition, Melville changed the word "discover" to "perceive", and with good reason, for "discovery" means finding what is already there, but "perceiving", or better still, perception, is "a matter of shaping what exists by the way in which we see it".[29] The point is not that Ahab would discover the whale as an object, but that he would perceive it as a symbol of his making.[29]

Yet Melville does not offer easy solutions. Ishmael and Queequeg's sensual friendship initiates a kind of racial harmony that is shattered when the crew's dancing erupts into racial conflict in "Midnight, Forecastle" (Ch. 40).[16] Fifty chapters later, Pip suffers mental disintegration after he is reminded that as a slave he would be worth less money than a whale. Commodified and brutalized, "Pip becomes the ship's conscience".[30] His views of property are another example of wrestling with moral choice. In Chapter 89, "Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish, Ishmael expounds the legal concept "fast-fish and loose-fish", which gives right of ownership to those who take possession of an abandoned fish or ship; he compares the concept to events in history, such as the European colonization of the Americas, the partitions of Poland, and the Mexican–American War.[31]

The novel has also been read as critical of the contemporary literary and philosophical movement Transcendentalism, attacking the thought of leading Transcendentalist[32] Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular.[33] The life and death of Ahab has been read as an attack on Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance, for one, in its destructive potential and potential justification for egoism. Richard Chase writes that for Melville, "Death—spiritual, emotional, physical—is the price of self-reliance when it is pushed to the point of solipsism, where the world has no existence apart from the all-sufficient self."[34] In that regard, Chase sees Melville's art as antithetical to that of Emerson's thought, in that Melville "[points] up the dangers of an exaggerated self-regard, rather than, as ... Emerson loved to do, [suggested] the vital possibilities of the self".[34] Newton Arvin further suggests that self-reliance was, for Melville, really the "[masquerade in kingly weeds of] a wild egoism, anarchic, irresponsible, and destructive".[35]


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